Robert Lowell

The most influential recent poet, Robert Lowell, began
traditionally but was influenced by experimental currents.
Because his life and work spans the period between the older
modernist masters like Ezra Pound and the contemporary writers,
his career places the later experimentalists in a larger context.

Lowell fits the mold of the academic writer: white, male,
Protestant by birth, well-educated, and linked with the political
and social establishment. He was a descendant of the respected
Boston Brahmin family that included the famous 19th-century poet
James Russell Lowell and a recent president of Harvard
University. Robert Lowell found an identity outside his elite
background, however. He went not to Harvard but to Kenyon College
in Ohio, where he rejected his Puritan ancestry and converted to
Catholicism. Jailed for a year as a conscientious objector in
World War II, he later publicly protested the Vietnam conflict.

Lowell's early books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and
Lord
Weary's Castle (1946), which won a Pulitzer Prize, revealed
great
control of traditional forms and styles, strong feeling, and an
intensely personal yet historical vision. The violence and
specificity of the early work is overpowering in poems like
"Children of Light" (1946), a harsh condemnation of the Puritans
who killed Indians and whose descendants burned surplus grain
instead of shipping it to hungry people. Lowell writes: "Our
fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones / And fenced
their gardens with the Redman's bones."

Lowell's next book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951),
contains moving dramatic monologues in which members of his
family reveal their tenderness and failings. As always, his style
mixes the human with the majestic. Often he uses traditional
rhyme, but his colloquialism disguises it until it seems like
background melody. It was experimental poetry, however, that gave
Lowell his breakthrough into a creative individual idiom.

On a reading tour in the mid-1950s, Lowell heard some of the
new experimental poetry for the first time. Allen Ginsberg's
Howl
and Gary Snyder's Myths and Texts, still unpublished, were
being
read and chanted, sometimes to jazz accompaniment, in coffee
houses in North Beach, a section of San Francisco. Lowell felt
that next to these, his own accomplished poems were too stilted,
rhetorical, and encased in convention; when reading them aloud,
he made spontaneous revisions toward a more colloquial diction.
"My own poems seemed like prehistoric monsters dragged down into
a bog and death by their ponderous armor," he wrote later. "I was
reciting what I no longer felt."

At this point Lowell, like many poets after him, accepted
the challenge of learning from the rival tradition in America --
the school of William Carlos Williams. "It's as if no poet except
Williams had really seen America or heard its language," he wrote
in 1962. Henceforth, Lowell changed his writing drastically,
using the "quick changes of tone, atmosphere and speed" that
Lowell most appreciated in Williams.

Lowell dropped many of his
obscure allusions; his rhymes became integral to the experience
within the poem instead of superimposed on it. The stanzaic
structure, too, collapsed; new improvisational forms arose. In
Life Studies (1959), he initiated confessional poetry, a
new mode
in which he bared his most tormenting personal problems with
great honesty and intensity. In essence, he not only discovered
his individuality but celebrated it in its most difficult and
private manifestations. He transformed himself into a
contemporary, at home with the self, the fragmentary, and the
form as process.

Lowell's transformation, a watershed for poetry after the
war, opened the way for many younger writers. In For the Union
Dead (1964), Notebook 1967-69 (1970), and later books,
he
continued his autobiographical explorations and technical
innovations, drawing upon his experience of psychoanalysis.
Lowell's confessional poetry has been particularly influential.
Works by John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath(the last
two his students), to mention only a few, are impossible to
imagine without Lowell.